Configuring the Avnet S6-OMAP board to use an SD Card root filesystem

The Avnet S6-OMAP CoProcessing board has an SD card slot and that can easily be used as a root fileystem. All you have to do is modify the U-boot configuration to pass the right boot arguments to the Linux kernel.

First, make sure you have a filesystem loaded on the first partition of an SD card, and that it is an ext3 filesystem. Ext3 support is compiled into the kernel by default. Ext2 can also be used, but kernel support for it would need to added.

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Using the default S6-OMAP U-boot macros

By default, the S6-OMAP board ships with a set of U-boot macros that make this process very easy. If you have the default U-boot configuration, simply change the bootcmd variable to run the right macro. There are two choices, depending on the preferred location of the kernel image.

spisdboot macro

The macro 'spisdboot' will load the kernel from SPI flash and use the filesystem on the first SD card partition.

AVNET u-boot # setenv bootcmd run spisdboot
AVNET u-boot #

tftpsdboot macro

The macro 'tftpsdboot' will load the kernel from the TFTP server and use the filesystem on the first SD card partition.

AVNET u-boot # setenv bootcmd run tftpsdboot
AVNET u-boot #

Manual Linux boot arguments

In case you do not have the default U-boot macros loaded on the board, here is another way to boot the board using an SD card filesystem. This assumes that a kernel is being loaded via TFTP, the kernel could just as easily be loaded from SPI flash.